Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The concept of society is both core to sociological analysis and subject to wide-ranging dispute that is often informed by the theoretical disputes within the discipline. When in 1987 the British prime minister Margaret Thatcher said in an interview “There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families,” many sociologists offered a robust defense of the concept. But one British sociologist subsequently stated: “Thatcher might have been right [in her claim] … or at least the riposte from the sociological community was not fully justified” ( Urry 2000 ). This illustrates an uncertainty within the discipline as to the appropriateness of the concept, especially in a globalized age in which the idea of discrete societies bound by national borders has been widely questioned. Ironically, however, in the rest of her interview Thatcher went on to emphasize the importance of reciprocal social obligations and bonds between people – things that many sociologists would regard as central to the idea of society. However, the idea of society as a generalized term for social relations is relatively new and appeared, like sociology, during the transition from pre-industrial to industrial society. Implicit concepts of the social can be identified much earlier, for example in Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy, but premodern philosophies did not generally differentiate ... log in or subscribe to read full text